Oh, it's gonna be the slaughter of the first born. A murrain will descend on our herds. The streets will crack and yawn and a plague of gigantic rats, all wearing pound signs on their lapels, will emerge to feast on the corpses of the eight million jobless. The sky will be the colour of blood, and Teresa Gorman will swoop on her winged chariot to exult in the smoking remnants of Japanese inward investment and blasted German yoghurt factories.

The indigent people of Britain, ever paler, ever thinner and nastier, will be kept by the French authorities from boarding the Eurostar, and held in pens at Dover; and in a spirit of savage self-sufficiency the Islington boulangeries will be boarded up, and cappuccino will be banned, and there will be nothing to eat but Cornish pasties and Eccles cakes from the ABC bakeries. Wine, cheese, even salami, will be forbidden from entering this country by the vengeful continental powers; and up and down the decaying motorways British drivers will stand crying over the blown gaskets of cars made exclusively in Dagenham or Longbridge or Cowley.

Enormous green creepers will coil about the City of London, choking and choking until they bring down those towers in a shower of rotten concrete, pelting the cardboard hutches of people who used to trade with continental Europe. The orphans and widows of the lost eight million will be held in common by the survivors; incest will be rife; cannibalism will be indulged; there will be nothing to drink save Tizer; and as the weather turns colder the men and women of our once-mighty service industries, accustomed to Armani, will clad themselves in the skins of squirrels, and paint themselves with woad...

I And if you think I exaggerate, if you think this is laying it on a bit thick, just read the Independent and the Express, loyal parrots of the New Labour line. If Britain were to leave the EU, says a group of 'academics' at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, the effects of 'lower demand' would feed through the system like some auto-immune deficiency, laying waste 30 per cent of Britain's 27.2 million strong workforce. They really seem to mean it, that one in three jobs would go. Two of Cherie Blair's new social secretaries would be sent weeping to the JobCentre. It would be an employment holocaust, say the 'academics', on a scale eclipsing the Depression of the Thirties 1930s, with a trudging army of jobless outnumbering all those currently working in the manufacturing, retailing and public sectors put together.

The effect was slightly spoilt yesterday when the top man at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research said the report was 'plain silly'. It turns out that there are 2.7 million jobs directly linked to trade with the EU, and a further 500,000 indirectly linked. According to Mr Martin Weale, it is 'unlikely that many of these jobs would be lost permanently even if Britain left the EU'. 'There is no reason ,' said Mr Weale, continuing to rain on Tony Blair's parade, 'why being outside the EU should necessarily involve mass unemployment.' In fact, said Mr Weale, he was so enraged at the way his boffins' findings had been distorted, so peeved with Mr Keith Vaz and his ridiculous 'Out of Europe, Out of Work' campaign, that he wasn't even going to turn up, this week, to the launch of the 'study', and its attendant poster unveiling operation. Of course, poor Mr Weale is right.

He is being used, cheated and cozened by the government, and the increasingly desperate ginger group, Britain In Europe. It is exceedingly doubtful that a single job would be lost if Britain withdrew from the EU tomorrow, whether in the short term or the long term; even the chauffeurs of Geoffrey Martin, the EC Commission's 'Ambassador' to London, would be safe, since the Commission would still need its ambassador here, just as it has them boondoggling away in Ouagadougou, Dar-Es-Salaam, Moscow and everywhere else. When I go to Switzerland, I don't notice a third of the workforce poking each other in the eye over the last chunk of Toblerone. And yet Francis Maude, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, who has been lured into denouncing this fantasy, is unwittingly playing the Government's game.

We are being tempted to give battle, but on the wrong battlefield. We are being cunningly asked the wrong question. There is not one major political party advocating that Britain should leave the EU. The Tories firmly want to stay in. I want to stay in. The question is nothing to do with In or Out, and all about the single currency; and as Mr Blair knows, an amazing 69 per cent of the public are now opposed to joining. It has been hilarious, over the last year and a bit, to see all the gloomsters eating humble pie. There was Lord Levene, the Lord Mayor of London, warning about the impact on the City if Britain failed to join the euro; until he was forced, late last year, to confess that he had been totally wrong, and that the fortunes of the City had leapt up like a bouncing bonus, while the euro had slipped below parity with the dollar.

It has become increasingly obvious (perhaps even to Gordon Brown) that Britain has a glorious future: continuing to enjoy whatsoever benefits there are of EU membership, but outside the euro, with its top-down bossiness, undemocratic tax harmonisation and inappropriate interest rates. That is why Blair and Vaz and Cook and their stooges in Britain in Europe have resorted to this cretinous babble about leaving the EU, and the loss of eight million jobs. And if this is the best they can do, the pound has a long life ahead of it.

On Wednesday Blair will go to Ghent, where he will attempt to soften public hostility to the euro by promising a parallel 'reform' of the EU's institutions. This is a laugh, since the core EU countries have no desire whatsoever to change the way Brussels works: the Commission undemocratically proposing, the Council undemocratically deciding, the Euro-parliament feebly sticking its oar in. It is now more than 10 ten years since the fall of the Berlin Wall. How long do they have to wait, those countries which suffered 40 forty years of Communist tyranny, before Brussels 'reforms' itself sufficiently to let them in? Another five years? Another 10?

If we go on like this, Prague, Budapest and Warsaw may decide to enjoy their prosperity on their own, even if Britain in Europe tells them that a third of their workforce is at risk. But let us suppose they do join, and the French get over their phobia of Hungarian jam imports, and the Germans brace themselves for Polish gherkins; let us suppose the EU encompasses the 27 countries envisaged by Romano Prodi. Never mind the absence of logic involved in welcoming, say, Moldova and excluding Ukraine. Does anyone imagine that this vast congeries of countries will all accept monetary rule from Frankfurt or obey the acquis communautaire?

Of course not. If reform means anything, it means a Europe in tiers, where some countries will be exempted from policies they cannot or will not accept. And that is the ideal context to campaign, as the Tories are, for Britain in Europe, but not in the euro, and an end to the pathetic attempts of Mr Vaz and Tony Blair to make our flesh creep.